Corps de Esprit - Lotus

Wanna race Lotus? Get some good ol' Georgia boys

Feature Article from Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car

Hands down, it was brilliant: Revive the 1970s theme of production-based cars shod with performance tires on the yawning stage of international motorsport, only this time, pull in somebody besides the tire company to support the whole thing. That was the idea that led IMSA to create the Bridgestone Supercar Championship, run for five furious years ending in 1995, using shaved-down Potenzas.
It was a purely Nineties thing, with big crowds (most events supported IMSA GTP rounds), a TV deal, sponsorship and best, manufacturer interest. Given the screaming economy, nobody ought to have been shocked that Porsche ended up in the Bridgestone series, with 911 Turbos gridded by its Florida proxies at Brumos Porsche. Less probable was the entry of Lotus, which, as a General Motors holding in the early 1990s, wanted a piece of the super-dollar import market that was going, in huge measure, to Porsche. Around the same time, Lotus had grabbed designer Peter Stevens, briefing him to redo the original Italdesign shape that had defined the mid-engine Esprit more than anything else.
Lotus has long located its U.S. offices in suburban Atlanta, which also happened to be the home of former Chevrolet road racer Harry Bundy, who goes by Doc. He, in turn, knew our narrator, Jack Ansley. While Bundy helped run an early works Esprit Turbo effort, this one, the one that counts, deeply involved Ansley, who was hooked on pro-level road racing at a very early age. His father was vice president of Royal Crown Cola, which once sponsored a Porsche 917-30 in the original Can-Am. After attending the University of Georgia on a wrestling scholarship (in the 177-pound class), he got a competition license, a Porsche 911 and a job with Hurley Haywood. His first race was the Daytona 24 Hours in 1976.
The engine blew up during the night. Ansley eventually came to work for longstanding Porsche privateer Franz Blam, doing prep work, moving on to other teams that included an early Bob Akin collaboration. He was producing Kevlar body panels for about 75 percent of the GTP teams, then became a team manager for Al and Art Leon's March-Chevrolet team. The Leon brothers then bought Road Atlanta from Bill and Don Whittington, installing Ansley as the track's co-owner and general manager. The Leons sold Road Atlanta about the same time that Bundy was pitching Lotus on the Bridgestone idea.
That's how Ansley, who now deserves a head-table seat in Lotus history, ended up running a team of homologation-special Esprit Turbos fitted with X180-R power, the ultimate expression of the Stevens-shaped S4. The Bridgestone years tend to get lost among Lotus lovers, but they're legit history. Drivers included the likes of P.L. Newman, Andy Pilgrim, Bobby Carradine and Boris Said, up to four cars per round, with Bundy taking a Bridgestone driver's title in 1992. The Bridgestone series ran out of steam just as Lotus was coming under its present Malaysian ownership, but it still had a title won against big-bore turbo cars like Mazda, Nissan and the odd Dodge Stealth, besides Porsche. Ansley agreed to narrate these images by his fellow Atlantan, Hal Crocker.
"These were incredible races. I've seen a lot of races in my time, and this series was some of the best, most intense, most competitive racing that I've ever witnessed, or that anyone has. It was a support series with an amazing level of driving talent spread among factory programs from Lotus, Porsche and Chevrolet. And most of these races were only 30 minutes long, with almost every one a flat-out, flag-to-flag sprint."
PHOTO 1
"This is Paul Newman at Road Atlanta. Okay, actually it's the car that Paul Newman usually drove, only Paul wasn't there, because this was a publicity shoot that we posed on the race track using his car, and I'm pretty sure this was in 1991. What we did was to pose this Esprit Turbo on the track at Turn Six in the opposite direction that the car would have usually traveled, so in a race, it would have been going uphill here, not downhill. Placing the inside tire on the apron provided the illusion that the car was loaded by g-forces. There's a lot of camber in the track at that spot. Our sponsor in 1991, as you can see, was Eclipse, an audio company that was then based locally in the Atlanta area and owned by Fujitsu Ten Ltd., of Japan. I don't know who was in the car, other than it wasn't Paul. Probably one of the crew members, I'd guess."
PHOTO 2
"The signage in the back for G.I. Joe, which was a longtime sponsor of the racing there, tells us that this was at Portland. In 1992, Doc is leading into this corner with Hurley Haywood just outside him, and Hans Stuck directly behind Doc in another Porsche. Andy Pilgrim is in the next Lotus, and in the third, the last car you can see in this photo, is David Murry. David is an old friend of mine that I first met when I was working for Franz Blam. He was doing some club racing at the time but wasn't really notable yet. I recognized the talent that he had and gave him a shot driving one of the Lotuses. Porsche ended up hiring him as a factory driver after our program with Lotus was over, I guess because they got tired of seeing him through their windshields. David ran with us for about four years, was tremendously successful and now drives for Dick Barbour, running the Ford GT40. Doc and David finished 1-2 here, with Andy third behind Stuck. That Corvette, by the way, was driven by a guy named Shawn Hendricks, who was a pretty good driver in this series."
PHOTO 3
"We ran a Bridgestone Supercar Championship race in conjunction with CART at Elkhart Lake one year, but for the most part, the majority of the series was run in support of the IMSA GTP races, the Camel GT. This particular photo comes from one of those weekends at Portland, with myself in the photo as we were getting ready to practice or test. I believe this is 1992. I remember that at Portland, we had been having a lot of handling issues, and were changing a lot of things trying to get the cars to work. I'm assuming that this was one of those test sessions, taking place during the race weekend. Joe Grassi, my crew chief, is on the driver's side of Doc's car, with the headset on. This photo really takes me back. I'm a cowboy from Georgia, and had a horse farm down here. Bo Lemler, one of our developmental drivers, had a pair of Lotus cowboy boots made for me, in green and yellow. I'm wearing them in this photo, and I wore them at every race. I've still got them, sitting on the back bar at my restaurant. When we won the Bridgestone championship in 1992, I had caught so much hell from the British mechanics, me being this American cowboy, that to get back at them, I had a pair of boots just like these, in the Lotus colors, made for everybody on the team."
PHOTO 4
"Most likely, this was the first lap, or close to it, but this photo demonstrates how close most of these Bridgestone Supercar races really were. It's 1991, and Doc Bundy is leading the pack down through the esses at Road Atlanta in our Esprit Turbo. That's either Hurley Haywood or Hans Stuck Jr. behind him in the Porsche; I can't see enough of the car to tell. The number 9 Lotus that you can see is Paul Newman, and Mike Brockman is in the number 11, behind the Pontiac Firebird Firehawk. We also had a fourth Esprit Turbo in this race, driven by Bo Lemler. Matt Adams won in one of the Firehawks, but we took the next four spots. This IMSA series tried to do the best it could at keeping the cars relatively stock, but these were X180-R Esprits, a race-built version of the Esprit SE. Lotus produced 20 of them and sold them as street cars, the number needed in order that they'd be legal to race in the Bridgestone Series, with an advertised 285hp to start with from the factory. Remember, though, we were looking at being competitive with Porsche, which was running the 911 Turbo. We were limited under the rules to stock boost pressure, but we still managed to routinely get 450hp out of the engines. I think the most we ever got in a dyno test was around 525hp, just trying to see what it could take. That's from a 2.2-liter four that was rated at 160hp before it was turbocharged. Race days, we were generally running 450 to 475hp, in a car that we got into the 1,900s, weight-wise."
PHOTO 5
"Doc's leading through Turn Five at Road Atlanta, and the guy right behind him is Cass Whitehead. He's driving a Nissan 300ZX Turbo, which shows the depth of interest the Bridgestone series had at its peak. We swept the top two spots in this race, ahead of Stuck's factory 911 Turbo, with Shawn Hendricks, still in the red Corvette, coming home fourth. The Porsche you can see here, though, had Jeff Purner as its driver, which I can tell because it's a non-Brumos car. He finished eighth."
PHOTO 6
"The Bridgestone Supercar Championship ran just twice on the Miami street circuit, and the second time, in 1993, Doc Bundy won it for us, with Andy Pilgrim and David Murry making it a 1-2-3 Lotus sweep. Doc actually originated the Lotus Esprit's U.S. racing program in 1990, which had struggled financially, before Doc came to me since I had pretty good success in finding sponsors. Doc is the guy who actually, personally went to Lotus and convinced them to race the Esprit Turbo, after he had raced production Corvettes along with the IMSA Corvette GTP car. I met Doc before that, when he was working for Al Holbert. He also drove for Bob Tullius. Doc still does some vintage racing, some driver coaching, plays some golf and stops in my restaurant every so often."
PHOTO 7
"Mike Brockman is running up front in our 11 car at Portland. I first met Mike in the 1970s, when I was still driving, and raced Corvettes, having paired a couple of times with John Greenwood before moving into Porsche 935s and a variety of GTP cars. Mike was good friends with Paul Newman, and was kind of my source to get Paul onto our team, and was a very good driver. Mike ultimately went on to race at Le Mans in a 911 GT3. He's done driving now: Got married, had some kids, and last I heard was living in Connecticut, running a Volvo dealership and a car wash. Mike commonly used the American flag windshield tint on his Lotus, to distinguish him from our other drivers. Judging by the helmet, that's Hans Stuck behind him, and Shawn Hendricks behind Stuck in the Corvette."

This article originally appeared in the December, 2009 issue of Hemmings Sports & Exotic Car.